The Ignored Rickman | Political Film Blog

With facile remembrances making the rounds today it may not be obvious to casual audience members what Alan Rickman has done yet has been edited out from the corporate media’s vulture feast.

One role that inevitably gets a nod is Hans Gruber, the Die Hard villain that put Rickman on the map. What isn’t mentioned is why. Gruber wasn’t a simple bad guy. He was a capitalist/terrorist, a pink elephant, something unthinkable in corporate consumer culture. His heist was a well-financed capitalist venture with clear goals and a distasteful externalized cost of blowing up all the hostages in order to get away. Sorry, you’re thirty years late for a “spoiler alert,” but that was Gruber’s diabolical plan.

He took on the persona of a leftist terrorist, a cliché of the 1970s and one that was manipulated and even faked by the powers that be across Europe in Operation Gladio. Die Hard turned this trope on its head, such that Gruber…